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Trusted Data Solutions Archive Migrations – Little-Known Facts

Trusted Data Solutions Archive Migrations – Little-Known Facts

by Perry Hiltz

As vendors continue to boast about their being the first to carry out an archive migration in 06’ thus creating this new market, we regrettably have to share this little-known internal fact – we at Trusted Data Solutions annually celebrate being the first entrant into the migration space, conducting the first ever Email Archive Migration in 2001.

How was TDS able to do this? In 1999, in the wake of numerous email scandals, the federal government of the United States of America enacted the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which required banks and financial firms retain their records including email. At that time, Trusted Data Solutions was already a trusted expert with a long history and accreditation in the legacy data space. With long-standing critical clients like Morgan Stanley, compliance and regulations have always been top of mind.

Considering this newly mandated law enforcing better and more secure practices, but on the other hand the lack of enterprise level solutions available to enterprise customers at the time to securely store and ensure access to critical data, our then biggest tape client Morgan Stanley decided to create their own email archive system to comply with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

While their development of an internal archiving solution was innovative, all their legacy email data at the time was being stored on backup tapes – and now needed to be moved to their new email archive solution. They immediately sought out TDS’s support, as their tape service provider and expert in tape management and restoration industry. We were able to successfully catalog their massive tape library consisting of 70,000 tapes, identify the emails on them, connect to the proprietary archive Morgan Stanley had developed, and seamlessly migrate their historic emails from tape to the new online archive thus facilitating full compliance with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

This was a monumental milestone in the evolution of TDS services and solutions portfolio marking the birth of TDS’s archive migration practice. Having been a tenured company already servicing enterprise customers around the world, adding the ability to look at the data type being stored on tapes enabled us to “deconstruct” archive database solutions and migrate the data out of the archive, whether it is user or journal data.

The TDS Advantage – Trusted Email Archive Migration

The TDS market advantage was a springboard from their already expert services and decades of experience in restoring legacy data that was being stored on tape, including voice and back-ups. Our ability to read backend data enabled us to utilize both the API interface provided by vendors as well as access the backend data directly. When other vendors claim that they are the only one that gives partners and end customers this option, not only are they not the only ones and unlike TDS, they are limited to a small amount of existing archiving sources and destinations. Additionally, it is important to note, as there is no such thing as an easy archive migration, that the choice to use a direct connection to the backend data or an API connection will not only depend on the platform but also the source data.

Trust, longevity and proven experience is usually the most suitable choice in ensuring a successfully executed migration. Our experience has not only allowed us to help enterprise customers find the most efficient migration path based on their business requirements, it has also given us the ability to connect to over 30 different source archive solutions and extract data to 20 different target solutions, more than any other vendor in market today.

Today, many of the largest archive solution providers such as Proofpoint, Smarsh, Global Relay and Mimecast to name a few, who service most Fortune 500 businesses continue to choose and work directly with our migrations team to securely and efficiently get all their customer data on their archiving platforms by way of partnering with TDS. In 2017, our business shifted when we began to see a tremendous amount of rescue deals coming our way from services partners who chose other vendors for migrating clients from on-prem to new or improved Cloud solutions. These channel partners took the bait on price and in some cases marketing speak, only to be presented with a stalled, faulty or inexecutable customer migration due to the other vendors’ limitations and migration expertise. This shift in the expanding channel community turning to TDS for our know-how marked the formation of the TDS TrustedPartner Program, a program which enforced the due diligence and technical depth required to expertly conduct an archive migration and allowed our channel partners to benefit from our long history, innovation and unmatched capabilities to ensure that their customers’ data would always be moved safely, accurately and legally defensibly all while decreasing their cost footprint and increasing partner revenue.

For more information and questions about Trusted Data Solutions and archive migrations, please reach out to sales@trusteddata.com or see this page.